


Lost in the Shadows of Time

by caliecat



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Coda, Episode Related, Episode Tag, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-01
Updated: 2011-06-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 00:18:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/206785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caliecat/pseuds/caliecat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life goes on. Extended coda to Season 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost in the Shadows of Time

**Author's Note:**

> This is the flipside of a happy fix-it fic; my take on the canon presented in the finale and its projection into the future.
> 
> A huge thanks to alamo_girl80 for the beta, her insights and her unwavering support.

Steve drinks in the scene before him—sparkling turquoise water stretched in an unbroken line to the horizon, the burn of the summer sun on his skin, the smell of the sea on the breeze and the warmth of the sand between his toes—cherished fragments of his life he feared he'd never experience again.

Every day since his release from prison five weeks ago, he's stepped out his back door, crossed the beach and stopped here, right at the edge of the shoreline, craving the openness and sense of freedom like oxygen.

He's holding his father's old Navy sextant, found buried under a stack of blankets in the back of a closet during one of his cleaning frenzies. He enjoys playing with it, mapping the stars at night and the coastal landmarks by day, easily remembering the basics of navigation he learned at Annapolis.

It's a good way to keep hands and mind occupied, a pleasure to completely lose himself in a task with a definitive endpoint, something with absolutely no ambiguity and no requirement for decision-making. Only the comforting rhythm of reading scales, taking measurements and running calculations.

His latest project is nearly complete. He checks the angle of the sun for a second time, consults his reference numbers and then grabs the piece of wood at his feet, not even wincing when the splinters stab his palm.

~~~~~~~

In September, after the dust settles, the Lieutenant Governor asks Steve to create a new task force from the ashes of the old, but his heart's not in it. Chin is already moving up within the HPD, Kono right behind him, both recognized for their pivotal roles in unraveling the connection between the Governor, the former Chief of Police and Wo Fat. They're happy, neither one willing to disrupt the fragile family bonds they finally repaired, step by painful step, over the last four months.

Each of them got what they needed from the Five-0—Kono her experience, Chin his redemption—and now it's time to let go of the past and build for the future. He understands completely and starts thinking that maybe he should move on along with everyone else.

So he cuts a deal with the Navy to keep his commission and teach courses on Military-Civilian Relations at Pearl. It's easy working on the base surrounded by the well-remembered routines and camaraderie of the service. Driving through the gate every morning almost feels like coming home.

The students frustrate him with their innocence and misplaced optimism, their single-minded focus on black and white and blindness to shades of gray. But he enjoys teaching nonetheless, relishes the structure and quiet pace, the opportunity to exercise his leadership skills, the potential to make a difference in someone's life. He earns a reputation as a tough grader, cracking down hard on students who can't grasp the intricacies of rules of procedure and civilian chains of command, telling them their lives might depend upon it someday.

But they're always too proud and stubborn to listen.

He gets together with Kono and Chin whenever all of their schedules allow. And then it's like the old days again, with the inside jokes and teasing and sense of _ohana_ , so warm and familiar that he almost forgets everything that's happened since. Until his gaze drops to the fourth chair at their table, the one always sitting cold and empty by his side.

~~~~~~~

Jenna moves back to D.C. for a while but finds the analyst desk too tame now. She returns to Hawaii in October, claiming she's fallen in love with the beauty and climate and culture, but he suspects she's only running from bad memories. He calls in a favor to get her a job with the local NCIS team where she quickly makes a home for herself, thriving on the fast pace and high stakes of counter-intelligence cases, sometimes even working in the field alongside the agents.

They drift into an unlikely friendship, maybe because despite their differences, they both understand loss. Some nights, when she's not tied up with an investigation, she stops by his house for a drink or two and he listens while she talks about her new life, letting her rambling words and breathless excitement fill the empty space for a few hours.

It's nice to have someone around, a welcome diversion from the dark train of thought he tends to pursue when he's alone for too long. But it's never the same as Danny.

~~~~~~~

When Rachel's divorce from Stan finally comes through in November she and Danny make plans to remarry in New Jersey.

"Just a quick trip to the courthouse," Danny explains over the phone, somehow sounding embarrassed and happy at the same time. "Don't even think about flying out here or sending a gift or anything like that, no matter what invitations or cards or whatever my mother mails you. Anyway, it's too close to Thanksgiving and the airports will be a nightmare."

Steve says all the right things even through the buzzing in his head, murmuring congratulations to the groom and best wishes for the bride, grateful he doesn't have to find an acceptable reason to stay home. Danny rattles on for a few more minutes, promises to send photos and make plans for a visit in the spring after the baby comes, then hangs up.

That night he plucks his father's old bottle of whiskey from the depths of the credenza, telling himself he's only pouring a shot or two in celebration. His sickening hangover the next morning is only one of many decisions he regrets.

~~~~~~~

In mid-January Danny calls at two in the morning to announce the birth of his second child, a healthy baby boy.

He relates a complicated story about a rushed trip to the hospital through eighteen inches of snow, shares a few choice words about drivers who don't belong on the roads in bad weather and ends with the reassurance that mother and son are doing fine.

Steve tosses the phone on the nightstand and rolls over but can't back to sleep. It seems like an eternity until dawn.

~~~~~~~

He finally attends his first professional baseball game in May.  

Danny's coming to Los Angeles for a law enforcement conference and manages to tack a vacation day on the end of the trip. So Steve flies into LAX, picks up a rental car and meets Danny at his hotel after the last workshop. That night they catch up on each other's lives until they're kicked out of the hotel bar at closing time. Then Danny returns to the room he's sharing with a colleague and Steve leaves for Mary's to crash on her couch.

The next morning he can't believe his eyes when he pulls up to the hotel entrance where Danny's waiting. "A Yankees cap, seriously?" he says in mock horror as he tosses Danny's luggage into the trunk. "You know they're playing the Red Sox, right?" Danny just waves him off, laughing, and rants about the sad state of baseball all the way to Anaheim.

It's a perfect afternoon, even though Danny nearly gets into a fistfight with three burly Boston fans sitting in the row behind them. They wolf down hot Italian sausages and cold beer, boo at missed catches and bad calls and cheer on the Angels as they beat the Sox six to five. Driving back to L.A. with the convertible's top down, Steve keeps sneaking glances at Danny, at his hair whipping in the wind and his eyes blazing with excitement, and wishes the day would never end.

But all too soon he's dropping Danny off at the airport for his evening flight home. There's barely time for one last, tight hug before Danny disappears into the terminal and he heads back to Mary's, alone.

~~~~~~~

They talk about meeting again in August, this time in San Diego. He'll be in Coronado for three weeks on special assignment with the SEALs and Danny thinks he can swing some vacation time. But then the baby gets sick, money is tight with Rachel still out of work and Danny's shift at the police station is short-staffed.  

Steve calls from California whenever he can.

~~~~~~~

In December he gets a photo holiday card from the "Williams Family". Everyone looks happy, all of them dressed in red and green and with seasonal smiles firmly in place, even the baby, almost a toddler now, with the same golden hair and pale blue eyes as his father.

As he looks closer he imagines he sees a strain in the set of Danny's shoulders and the lines around his eyes, a shadow of something hard across his face. But it doesn't matter. Danny will never leave this marriage because of the children. Steve just doesn't know whether to love him or hate him for that.

~~~~~~~

Every so often he opens his mailbox and finds an oversized, colorful envelope addressed in Grace's small neat writing to "Uncle Steve".

She's grown into a surprisingly good artist, capturing her life in charcoal and colored pencils, cheerful scenes of leafy backyards and skating parties and her new puppy. He hangs them on the refrigerator with little souvenir magnets he buys at the ABC store, shifting them around as each new one arrives until the surface is smothered with papers. Over time they become creased and dirty from constant handling, so he starts displaying them in acrylic photo frames instead, scattering them around the rooms of his house so one is never far from sight.

One day, she sends him a pencil drawing of himself standing on his beach, surfboard spiked at his feet, hair dripping with water and a big grin on his face, signed at the bottom right with her characteristic "G. Williams" in flowing cursive letters. He brings it to the local art shop for matting and framing, then hangs it on the wall in the study, right over his father's old desk, where he can see it each night after returning home.

~~~~~~~

On a rainy Saturday morning he decides to clean out the attic and discovers a box of old photos tucked under the eaves.

Sorting through them nearly shatters him but he manages to set a handful of special ones aside. Baby pictures, with his mom holding him in her arms. As a toddler, standing for the first time, one chubby little hand wrapped around each of his parents' fingers. Age five, on the beach with his dad, learning how to throw a football.

He braves the crowds at Aloha Stadium to search the market stalls for simple, old-fashioned frames, then hangs the photos around the house next to Grace's artwork. Slowly, painfully, his perspective shifts as childhood memories replace the images haunting his nightmares; seven hundred steel balls aimed at a driver's face, floor and walls stained with a man's blood.

The Navy teaches you to train and drill until new habits become a part of you. Gradually, the constant reminders of his past bring him a new sense of peace in the present.

~~~~~~~

On weekends, when there's no more work to do and the long, empty nights hang before him, he sits in the beach chair after the sun sets with a cooler at his side and remembers. Sometimes it takes two beers, sometimes four before he's ready to face his ghosts again.

He flashes back to the night it all fell apart, relives the moment when he was so blinded by panic and anger that he almost shot Danny stepping through the doorway, never noticing the late hour and the two six-packs of beer and what they both signified. His one chance to talk sense into Danny, to back him up and calm him down and help him figure out what to do, had slipped through Steve's fingers like grains of sand.

He thinks of all the other chances he passed up, all the times he could have reached out to Danny but didn't, all the things he'll never be able to say to him now.

He wonders if any of it was worth it.

But then he always circles back to the same thought. "Destiny," Chin once told him. "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path." 

And maybe in the end, that's all there really is.

When the devils stop whirling in his head and his muscles are loose and relaxed, he shifts the chair until the angle is right, rests an open bottle on his stomach and sights straight down the weathered piece of wood he planted at the high tide mark.

He tracks a line through the foaming surf to the calmer waters off-shore, navigates a path over the horizon and across the vast expanse of the Pacific, hits landfall north of San Francisco, glides past the deserts and buttes of the West, soars above the craggy peaks of the Rockies, swoops low over the broad plains of the Midwest, skims the southern tips of the Great Lakes, crosses the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, flies over the forests and farms and towns of Northern New Jersey until he's nearly to the shoreline of the Hudson, then drops down to the quiet, tree-lined street asleep under the moonlight.

After the bottle is drained he lets it fall from his fingers, slouches down in the chair with his legs splayed out in the cool sand, tips his head back and traces the constellations spinning across the night sky. The stars wink back with their cold white light, a universe away and yet somehow closer than the tidy brick house with the powder blue shutters, lost in a city on the edge of the wrong ocean, exactly four thousand nine hundred and fifty-one miles from the center of his heart. 

  


**Author's Note:**

> This was a hard story to write and yet amazingly cathartic. As always, all comments, critiques and feedback are appreciated.


End file.
